Category: How to

Drop Down The Get Started Menu

Correct at time of writing – 14th May 2014]

This menu has 5 items on it. You can access Module 1 but for the rest you have to upgrade and become an SFM member. Module 1 has quite a lot in it and so do all the subsequent modules so I will cover each module with one or more posts.

Here’s the menu items in module 1:

Welcome to the SFM

There are 2 videos and an overview on this page.

The main messages from the first 9 minute video are “learn while you earn”, “you don’t need to make the same mistakes everyone else does”, “keep it simple”, “stay focused”, “get your mind in the right place” and “we have put together a system that will get results if you follow it”.READ MORE

I Knew It Was Coming

On Thursday 20th February 2014 my PC crashed and I could not recover it this time without major surgery.

I knew it was coming. My PC had slowed down markedly all of a sudden and I could hear the disc chattering more than usual. Sounded like bad sectors to me (areas on the disc probably worn out). And which bits of the disc get used the most? Yep, the important bits where the operating system lives.

I thought, I’m going to have fix that pretty soon, I’ll back up again at the weekend and sort it out then. I procrastinated a bit because although I have everything to do a total rebuild it takes a few days.READ MORE

Drop Down The Home Menu Item

[Correct at time of writing – 5th February 2014]

This is the second in a series of posts about the Six Figure Mentors (SFM) back office and what you would experience if you became a member.

After having a look around the Dashboard the next logical area to look at is the drop down menu Item “Home”. As you can see there are 4 items on it at the moment. The first item just takes you back to the Dashboard which we have already covered so let’s look at the next 3.

About The SFM

This is a very brief overview of the SFM by way of a little history and in effect, a short mission statement.READ MORE

Transparency / Gradient / Opaque / Opacity

You can overlay one image onto another so that the foreground image does not completely obscure the background. Here are a couple of ways this can be done.

One way is to discard the background so an image like a logo or a person can be overlaid onto whatever background or colour is required. PowerPoint slides and web pages are typical examples of where you might want to do this. In this example the logo has no background and overlays the grey lines without obscuring them. This is not really transparency but amounts to a similar effect.READ MORE

You’ve just logged In For The First Time

This is the first in a series of posts about the Six Figure Mentors (SFM) back office and what you would experience if you became a member.

I’m going to take you through the whole back office site so that you will get a really good idea of what you will get should you decide to become involved with the Six Figure Mentors (SFM).

We know that the SFM is not for everybody. There are many programs and systems out there that promise to deliver this and that and many people will want to go for what appears to be the easy money. Some of those programs and systems may deliver what they say they will but the vast majority won’t. That’s not what the Six Figure Mentors is about.READ MORE

Resizing The Image Canvas

Sometimes an image is just the wrong shape. There are two easy ways to deal with this, one is to crop the image and the other is to increase or change the canvas size.

Increasing or changing the canvas size is straightforward enough on images that have a uniform background but images with a variable background are not so easy. I will show you how to deal with filling in the new canvas area where the background is simple and some ideas on how to deal with more complex and variable backgrounds.

The video below explains how to resize an images canvas and work with the new canvas areas. What you will learn is listed below the video.READ MORE

Simple Ways To Crop An Image

The video below explains some simple and fairly basic cropping. What you will learn is also listed below the video.

I will explain more of the available cropping options and advanced features in a future article.

What You Will Learn About Cropping

What is Cropping? Cropping is the process of selecting one or more areas of an image and discarding the rest. For example, if you have an image of a cat and a mouse, you can select just the mouse and discard the rest of the image. Cropping usually reduces the size of an image as a consequence of selecting less than the whole image.READ MORE

Working With Images Can Be Easy!

You can do some very complex things with images but most of the time most people only need to apply simple changes to them. This series of articles will deal with those simple popular changes to images that will get you by in the majority of cases. Changes like cropping, resizing, etc.

You can use whatever image editing software you like but in this series I will be using Paint.net because it’s free and easy to use. If you have used Adobe Photo Shop you will find Paint.net familiar but lighter. Paint.net uses less of your computers resources which makes it pleasant to use.READ MORE

WordPress Menus – More Powerful Than You Might Think!

Creating WordPress menus or sub menus to external pages without utilizing WordPress pages or a plugin is not a secret but many people don’t realize that you can do this so I hope this demonstration will succeed in showing you how easy it is.

The Main Points

The great thing with WordPress menus is that they are flexible enough that you can have your cake and eat it!

To Create a sub menu of external links without using WordPress pages:

Go to Posts -> Categories from your WordPress dashboard.

Create a category with a suitable name for your menu.

Go to Appearance -> Menus

Choose the menu category you created and add to menu

Now you can create external link items:

Line them up appropriately and save the menu. It should look similar to this:

I recommend you use a WordPress page instead of a category for the main menu item and add the same menu options within it as I think it looks tidier and offers another option.READ MORE

Create Shorter Tweets – The best of 140 characters

I got asked by a company called Pardot if I would like to share and use their Twitter infographic on getting the best out of Twitters 140 characters to create shorter tweets and get your message across so I said I would publish a guest blog post for them and here it is.

Marketing experts are always looking for engaging, attention-grabbing tweets. it’s not always easy squeezing a full marketing message into 140 characters or less, it can be a huge challenge-especially when you have lots to say! www.pardot.com has made an infographic called “Best Practices for Shorter Tweets” giving you tips to get the most out of short but sweet tweets.READ MORE

If Only I had Known This Before

This information is all over the internet but I am repeating it here because much of it is often overlooked and if this is where you came across it and it helps you then that’s great.

The more geeky amongst you will probably already know many of these Windows shortcuts, also known as Hot Keys. All the same, I often come across people who don’t know about many of the following keyboard shortcuts for Windows even though most of them have been around for many years.

I suggest that you take time to learn these, print them out, I guarantee that they will make your life easier. Many of them work nearly everywhere; in Word, Web browsers, Windows explorer online software, offline software, the list goes on.READ MORE

Upload Images Really Fast

Some people will know how to do this already but some won’t. It didn’t occur to me for quite a long time.

Let’s say you want to find an image on the internet (watch out for royalties etc.) and then insert it into a Word document, an email, Facebook, a WordPress post or anything that uses the Windows Explorer dialogue. I bet this is the way that most people do it:

Find the image in your web browser

Right click it and save it to your hard disc

Go to Word and choose “Insert image”

Go to the folder where the image is

Select the image and press return or click insert

If that’s what you are doing there is a quicker way and I’ll show you in the video below how to upload images really fast. Ok, maybe not really fast but significantly faster and if you like me, insert images into things a lot then this is really useful.READ MORE

They’re All At It You know!

Dear reader, I don’t know if you are part of an internet marketing training program or not but regardless of it, the internet training space is changing. Up to now it has mostly been about the training, now it’s about the tools as well.

Up to fairly recently if you subscribed to a training program you would need to go and source the tools you needed to do the job elsewhere even if they were recommended by the training program you are in. Now internet training programs are gradually becoming one stop shops where you can get the training and the tools.READ MORE

Blog Spam

This is more of brief on blog spam rather than a full blown run down on the whole thing. One thing is for sure and that is if you have a blog, after a while you are going to get spam comments and you could get a lot of it.

Why do you get blog spam? One of the main reasons you get it is because people are trying to build up back-links to their blog site or web page. They want to do this because it makes their web site or blog rank higher with Google and there is nothing wrong with this in itself, back-links are good (back-links are where you put a link back to a website as part of a blog post comment in this case). The problem comes when people start making comments that have nothing to do with your web site or blog post and they are doing it merely for the link.READ MORE

It’s Not That It’s Hard

If you are a reasonably technical person then making video’s and editing them should come fairly easy. Maybe you already know how to do all the following but this is primarily aimed at those who don’t, are not so familiar with technical things and perhaps are even a little afraid of having a go. See “My Technical Mandate” for more information on my approach to explaining technical things.

I started off making an introductory video so that people could put a face to a name. The internet can be such an anonymous place sometimes and having seen some other people do this I thought it was good idea to do the same. Then I got to thinking, wouldn’t it be nice to put a little credits video clip at the beginning and some slides at the end showing some of the things I think are good and that I promote. The result was this:READ MORE

Shortcoder, A Macro Of A Difference

Once discovered this is one WordPress plugin you won’t want to be without.

WordPress has shortcodes built in, shortcode extension plugins and for this post, plugins that let you create your own shortcodes. There are a number of plugins that do this but the one I am using and the one I am going to talk about is this one “Shortcoder“.

What Is A Shortcode?

A shortcode is a “Macro” so I guess the question really is, what is a macro?

A shortcode or macro is a place holder that can be replaced by something else such as a sentence, a block of code or some paragraphs. Not only can you substitute them but you can send parameters or if you like values from the macro to that which substitutes it.READ MORE

This Works In WordPress And Anything HTML

This is a nice simple technical tip on how to center things in WordPress and keep them centered. It will work with anything HTML but is particularly useful in WordPress as when you center things in WordPress the editor strips the centering out sometimes.

For example, if you embed a Youtube video and try centering it, the editor will often strip the centering out. You can try saving it from the text/HTML tab but it’s a hit and miss business. It also depends on what version of WordPress and which editor that you are using but here’s a very simple way to add centering that almost always works, the WordPress editor doesn’t strip it out, well it’s worked up to now 🙂READ MORE

Succumbing To Technical Things

I’m from a technical background, I spent 20 years in IT. I’m digital marketing now (internet marketing if you like) but my main strength is on the technical side of things so after some thought I have decided to succumb to it and make it my mission to try and explain technical things mostly related to Digital/Internet Marketing for the benefit of people who are not technical and in an easy to understand way without going into geekdom. That’s why I have re-branded as a “Digital Marketer With A Touch Of Tech”!READ MORE

Trusting Me, Trusting You?

I’m talking about me as well as anyone else! After all, who am I, why should you trust me and why should I trust you? Over the internet it’s not as easy to establish trust as it is if you meet someone face to face and/or speak to them on the phone. It’s not the first time I have mentioned this in a blog. One way to help build trust is to make a video so people can at least see the whites of your eyes so to speak. Another good way is to have lots of identity on the internet so that people can see that you are not hiding ready to run away from some scammy deal.READ MORE